Mike Green talks to Sarah Dixon about the role of green chemistry in industry

Mike Green is the manager of the homogenous and organic synthesis group of the Sasol Technology Research and Development division in Sasolburg, South Africa. He is an editorial board member of Green Chemistry and an RSC council member.

 

What inspired you to become a chemist? 

Like a lot of people, I had a very good chemistry teacher at school. He inspired a group of us to do chemistry. Three of us actually all went on to study it at King's College London. It's an inspiration to have a good teacher with enthusiasm to teach the subject. 

What led you into the field of green chemistry? 

It evolved from working in industry. I carried out a lot of work where there were key targets we wanted to achieve to improve yields and selectivities and minimise waste. By definition, those are green objectives. I also worked for BP for nineteen years and I was around in the 1980s when the Venture Research Unit was opened by Don Braben. They were looking at topics that had no immediate commercial application but were areas of science that BP wanted to fund. I remember two of the proposals that came in at the time - one from Ken Seddon on ionic liquids and one from Martyn Poliakoff on supercritical fluids. I got to know them both when they were starting off in the green chemistry area and I got involved in their areas of research. Since then, they remain key areas of interest.

Where do you see the field developing in the next few years? 

I think it's a question of having the resources to do the research that's needed. There is always the incentive to make processes more effective and efficient and when you couple that with legislation, particularly environmental legislation, I think things naturally come together. It's simply a question of finding the internal resources to put sufficient money into research and development to get to the right solutions.

What are the difficulties faced by industry? 

There is a lot of very good work going on in industry, but it's a question of whether the public are willing to pay the additional costs of green chemicals. At the moment, they aren't prepared to pay the extra money and so industry finds itself in a very difficult situation. It has the opportunity to develop green chemicals and find new applications but the customer and market place mean that they struggle to get them off the ground. For example, there have been a number of biodegradable polymers developed over the past few years but getting them into the market place is difficult.

What part of your job do you enjoy the most?

The nice thing about working in industry is that you interact with a lot of different groups, for example customers, technologists, universities and intellectual property people. It is that interaction with people and the way that the technology moves forward as a result of those communications and collaborations that make the job interesting. It's like a big family of people, both within and outside the organisation.

How do you find working in South Africa? 

It's fascinating because there is a lot of original research being done in South Africa and many people don't realise this. There are many extremely talented young people coming up through the university systems and to be able to work with them and to help them develop is exciting. 

You work a lot with academic groups based in universities. How important do you find this collaboration between academia and industry? 

There is so much that needs to be done that companies can't afford to do it all by themselves, either because they don't have the money or simply because they don't have the variety of skills that the new technologies require. Collaboration with academia is a natural consequence. It is important, though, to establish collaborations in which both parties have exactly the same objective because then success is much easier to achieve.

What is the most difficult problem you have had to overcome?

The most difficult thing you face as an industrial researcher is to realise that the research may not meet the required objective. It's the fact that you can only take the chemistry so far and then you have to make a decision whether it's going to be commercially viable or not. At that stage, you have to take a hard decision - if it's not going to meet the company's objective, you have to stop the work. I think a lot of industrial chemists find that difficult but it's something we accept as part of the job. Only 1 in 20 reactions that we look at will ever reach commercialisation. If mentally you can come to terms with that then you can have a very successful career in industry.

If you weren't a scientist, what would you be?

I would have loved to be a cricketer. For many years, I was a member at Old Trafford. I used to sneak out of the lab on sunny days when I was doing my PhD in Manchester to go and watch the cricket. Whether I would have been any good or not is another matter! But one can always dream.